The Trump administration has increasingly received more and more criticism for its slow response to the ongoing crisis in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. With US officials privately acknowledging that the president waited too long to get the military involved in the recovery efforts, MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow used a late-night TV hit to slam President Trump on the issue.
Appearing on NBC’s The Tonight Show, Maddow was asked by host Jimmy Fallon what her thoughts were on Trump’s continued attacks on NFL players protesting during the national anthem. She answered that folks should realize that he didn’t jump into the fray with a “spontaneous outburst” when he first brought it up at an Alabama campaign event last week.
“He decided he was going to make a racially divisive issue out of something going on in sports,” she noted. “They planned on it, they built a whole campaign around it, and then he launched it.”
Maddow then went on to point out that while Trump was obsessed with and tweeting about the whole NFL thing, “Puerto Rico was drowning” before he could be bothered to say anything about it.
“Three and a half million Americans in Puerto Rico, and the president was really preoccupied with trying to make a racial issue out of the NFL while he wasn’t doing anything about that,” she exclaimed. “And that, I think, is going to stick, and I think that’s going to be in — that’s going to be in his history, no matter what else he does.”
Besides saying that this chapter will be part of his legacy, Maddow also told Fallon that the recovery effort in Puerto Rico has “been a bad, inept, poorly run, inattentive response with no political leadership.”
Watch the clip above, via NBC.
[image via screengrab]
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